There’s a version of caregiving that looks, from the outside, like faithfulness. You are present. You show up. You do the next hard thing, and then the next. But somewhere in the middle of all that doing, the enemy often still finds his way in through the side door. It’s not always with anything dramatic. Sometimes, it’s just with noise. Sometimes it’s distraction. Almost always, in my experience, it begins with emotional static, and if you are not careful, if you are not watching, you stop being led by the Spirit and start being led by whatever you are feeling in a given moment.
I know this from more than one personal experience. I know this from the inside out. Even with that knowledge, though, it is still something I sometimes struggle with today. Vigilance is necessary, in the form of awareness and personal responsibility.
I have been an emotionally led person all of my life. I didn’t always have language for it, but looking back I can trace the pattern with crystal clarity: the overwhelm when I was a young child (around age 7, when I was tasked with sitting with and meeting basic needs of my grandmother after school until my parents arrived home after work, until around age 12, when my grandmother was placed in a nursing home), then as a 16 year old girl, when she died. And then, in college, when everything felt too loud and too heavy and I did not yet have the theological or psychological framework to name what was happening.
Then there were the early years of marriage, and especially the early years of motherhood, when the weight of responsibility and love and fear arrived all at once and I had no idea how to sort them. And then the painfully drawn out caregiving years, when I was holding so much for so many for so long that I stopped checking in with the Spirit altogether and just started running on the fumes of whatever emotion was loudest that day.
That season is where it broke open for me in the most visible way. Caregiving is its own kind of warfare, quiet and grinding, and the enemy knows how to work those conditions. He does not always come at you with something obvious. Sometimes he just keeps adding weight until the emotional load is so heavy that you reach for anything that will make it lighter, even if that’s just for an hour or a mere moment. For me, that became alcohol. I do not say that lightly, and I will not dwell there, because that is not the point of this piece, but it is important to be honest that being emotionally led without correction can walk you somewhere you never intended to go. It added a whole other layer I then had to climb back out of, by grace, one day at a time. Recovery became its own school.
And then there were more seasons, because that’s how life works. The season that has been especially difficult for me is the grief season, because even when it seems that the season has passed, it never fully resolves. And then, my son’s autism diagnosis as a teen, which added even more weight just when I thought that finally receiving a diagnosis on paper would somehow lighten things a bit. Now, navigating that, plus his extreme OCD diagnosis, and two major job changes and life shifts that have pressed hard on my physical health in the last year – it has been a heavy load, and I have been in observation mode, watching the old pattern try to resurface in new clothes.
The stress is different. The emotions are different. And I am different, at my core. But the mechanism is exactly the same: feelings (for me, specifically anxiety) threatening to run the show.
The What of Being Emotionally Led
Psychology gives us a working definition, and I want you to really sit with it and let it saturate your reasoning. It’s so important to understand what feelings really are. Feelings are conscious, subjective experiences arising from emotional responses, sensations, and attitudes, often described as the brain’s interpretation of physiological and environmental changes.
The key phrase there is “brain’s interpretation.” Your brain is constantly scanning, analyzing, and assigning meaning to your circumstances, and then producing a feeling based on that interpretation. The feeling is real, but the interpretation is not always accurate. In short, our brains often lie to us. Our feelings are filtered through our history, our wounds, our nervous systems, our sleep, our hormones, our grief, and especially through our fear.
Feelings are data, but they are not always reliable data. In psychology, the capital-S Self refers to the ego’s seat of identity. It is the interpretive, feeling center that processes experience and generates meaning. It is not the same as the Spirit. In fact, for the Christian, it is precisely the place where the Spirit does its deepest renovating work. This distinction matters enormously for the Christian – anyone walking any spiritual path, really – because if we are building our decisions, our moods, and our sense of reality on that data without first submitting it to the Spirit, and the Word or guidance of our spirituality, we are building on something that shifts by the hour, and is never solid or stable. We are leaning on something that cannot hold our weight.
Scripture gives us several gems of wisdom about precisely this. Paul, one of the most prominent examples, understood this tension intimately. In Galatians 5:16-17, he writes:
This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.
Emotions are not the whole of the flesh, they are a facet of it. They are the part of us that can rise up and drown out the quieter voice of the Spirit if we let it. Romans 8:4-5 extends that thought:
That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
What we set our attention on shapes what leads us. Repeat that to yourself: What we set our attention on shapes what leads us. This is not just theology. It is neuroscience. The pathways we rehearse become the pathways we default to.
The How of Doing It Differently
The first thing, which may sound simple but is not, is recognition. Before you can change the pattern you have to see it. For a long time I did not realize I was emotionally led. I thought I was just a sensitive person, and I am. But sensitive is not the same as Spirit-led.
At some point I had to honestly take stock and say, “I am letting my feelings dictate my mood, my decisions, my relationships, and even my perception of God’s nearness.” That recognition, quiet and honest before God, is itself an act of the Spirit at work in you. Matthew 26:41 holds a truth I return to often:
Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Watching matters, because you can’t guard what you do not see. As a Christian, prayer carries an equal weight. You can’t walk in faith that God will help you if you aren’t asking Him to do so (that may seem contradictory, but it truly isn’t, and I will explore that in a future post).
The second thing I have had to learn, and keep relearning, is that feeling something is not the same as being required to follow it. You can feel an emotion, acknowledge it fully, and still choose not to let it direct you. Proverbs 3:5-8 is probably my most-reached-for passage in this territory:
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.
The word lean is physical language. To lean on something is to let it support your weight, to be propped up and guided by it. Leaning on your emotions means letting the most recent, or the current, intense feeling carry you. Leaning on God means turning, actively and sometimes urgently, toward him in the middle of it. Acknowledge Him. That acknowledgement can look like whispering his name. It can look like stepping away to breathe and pray. It can look like opening the Word or putting on worship music, or just stopping long enough to say, “I feel this, but You are still God, and I trust You.”
The emotion does not have to disappear for you to redirect. That is a neurological reality as much as a spiritual one. Brief separation from the intensity, even if it is just five minutes of conscious distraction from Self/emotion, allows the brain’s regulatory systems to re-engage and the emotional flood to begin to settle. God built that into us. It’s a tool He gave us, really… and it’s one that we would be better off to use, and to sharpen when it gets dull. The Spirit can work with it, through it – thus, with and through us.
The third thing (and this is something I admittedly spent years getting wrong) is that emotions themselves are not the enemy. The goal is not to become someone who does not feel. That is not holiness, not even close. That is something closer to dissociation, and it is dangerous to both our spiritual and physical safety. God did not design us for it.
In Psalm 42:5, David writes:
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?
That is not a man who has mastered emotional suppression. That is a man in real distress, pouring his actual interior life out before God. Now look at where that Scripture, in full, resolves:
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. (Psalm 42:5)
The emotion is real. The faith is real alongside it. David does not resolve the feeling by pretending it away. He brings it directly into the presence of God and lets trust hold what his feelings could not.
Martha does something similar in John 11, and I’ve sat in my prayer closet with this for untold hours in my own grief and blaming of God. Standing before Jesus in the grief of her brother’s death, she says:
Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.
That is grief and even a reproach, spoken directly to the Son of God. I’ve said the same thing to Him, many times. But in the same breath, Martha says:
But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee.
She does not hide the ache. She brings it, with the frustration and questioning that creates it, and then reaches, in that same moment, for trust. That is what Spirit-led emotional life actually looks like. It is not the absence of feeling. It is feeling held within faith.
The fourth thing, and perhaps the most foundational of all, is the ongoing work of tending the heart. Jeremiah 17:9 is blunt about this:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
That is not meant to make us despair of ourselves. It is meant to make us honest about the fact that the heart, as the seat of our emotions and desires, is not a trustworthy guide left to its own devices. It requires tending. Proverbs 16:9 holds the companion truth:
A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.
Proverbs 4:23 gives us the charge:
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
What we allow to take up residence in the heart shapes everything that flows out of it. What we consume, what we dwell on, what we let replay, who we allow to speak into us, all these things either prepare the heart to be a place where the Spirit can move freely, or they crowd it with noise until we can barely hear anything at all. This is not about perfection. It is about stewardship. It is about asking honestly, what am I feeding this, and then making adjustments with God’s help.
Closing Thoughts
I do not have this fully figured out, and I will not pretend that I do. I am still in the middle of it, honestly. I think we all are, throughout life. Our spiritual walk is not a journey that has a beginning, middle and end in the conventional, human way of organizing things. But what I do know is that the peace Philippians 4:7 calls the peace “which passeth all understanding” is not available to a heart being run by its feelings. It is available to a heart that has learned to bring its feelings to God and then let Him lead. That is the practice, that is the daily return, and it is worth everything it costs.
You are not failing because you feel deeply. You are not far from God because the emotions are loud right now. You are human. He made you that way, and He is not surprised by any of it. The same God who listened as David poured out his cast-down soul, who stood still while Martha said if you had been here, can handle what you are carrying today. Bring it to Him. All of it.
Father, we thank You that You are near to the brokenhearted and those who are struggling. We thank you that You are not distant from our struggle but present in it. We praise You that You are the same God who met David in his anguish, who stood with Martha in her grief, and who meets us right here, right now, in whatever we are carrying.
Lord, help us to feel without being led by our feelings. Help us to bring every emotion, every fear, every doubt, every concern, every question, and every overwhelm, directly to You before we let it run the show. Remind us that Your peace is not the absence of hard things. Help us to stay ever-aware that Your peace is Your presence in the middle of all things. Teach us to acknowledge You first, in every moment, in every emotion, in every season.
We trust You with what we cannot carry, and we thank You that You are faithful to direct our steps when we surrender our understanding to You. We thank You that Your peace truly does pass all understanding, and that it is freely given to those who bring everything to You. We are grateful, Lord. We are grateful.
Amen.
Twin Tree Project 